Save the NHS: Shut your local hospital

Trick question: You are involved in a serious road accident which has resulted in a life threatening brain injury. Do you want to be taken to the nearest hospital?

Answer: Not necessarily.

By Oliver Wright | Eagle Eye | Monday, 20 June 2011 at 10:47 am

Exclusivist views of faith

As I was saying, Tony Blair has written a new introduction for the paperback edition of A Journey. In it, he sets out “two essential religious types”

By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Thursday, 16 June 2011 at 12:33 pm

I disagree with Tony Blair

I disagree with Tony Blair. But I’ll come back to that presently. I’ve been reading his introduction to the paperback edition of A Journey, in which he talks about religion.
But I also flicked through some of the rest of it, and was struck by this argument (page 681), which I didn’t take in first time [...]

By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Tuesday, 14 June 2011 at 3:19 pm

Left tokenism, hand waving and soporific sloganising … bound to fail

Hopi Sen has stopped blogging, temporarily we hope, but continues to deploy his brilliance in, of all ghastly dark corners of the internet, the Comment Is Free comment boxes. To save you going there, I reprint his response to Neal Lawson, chair of Compass, in full here…

By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Monday, 13 June 2011 at 3:59 pm

“A crisis of finance capitalism”

In the new paperback version of his memoirs, Tony Blair apparently scoffs at the idea that the 2008 meltdown – and subsequent public finance emergency – was a crisis of the market. Well, Vince Cable’s not scoffing at the idea: he’s embracing it.

By Ben Chu | Eagle Eye | Sunday, 12 June 2011 at 1:56 pm

The Crash of 2008: No Left Turn

Extracts from the 31-page introduction to the paperback edition of Tony Blair’s A Journey are available on the book’s website. This bit, which is not on the website, is interesting, as it follows Blair’s warning to the left in the hardback original against taking the wrong lesson from the financial crisis:
In 2008, it was commonly [...]

By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Saturday, 11 June 2011 at 3:43 pm

“It’s the politics that got small”

Grateful to The Daily Telegraph for supplying a useful bundle of primary source material for next year’s Masters course in The Labour Governments 1997-2007 at Queen Mary, University of London.
Some of the students from previous years’ undergraduate course in The Blair Government talked to the BBC about what it was like to study ultra-contemporary history.
Yesterday [...]

By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Friday, 10 June 2011 at 12:39 pm

A Lesson from The Boss

For the last session of the Blair Government class at Queen Mary, University of London, the students went to see their subject himself at his London office on Friday. This year’s students were eight when Tony Blair became Prime Minister. (Also in the photograph are some of the postgraduates who help with the course and [...]

By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Monday, 23 May 2011 at 10:10 pm

Look Back at the Royal Revenge

I have not gone on much about the royal snub to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown last month, but I wanted to quote (with permission) from an email I received from Gavin Turner. He says he is “less an admirer of Blair” than me, but he feels that “one’s personal views (or indeed the royal [...]

By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Monday, 16 May 2011 at 10:56 am

The royal torture chamber

The Royal Family doesn’t stir up the media monster. The monster doesn’t need stirring up. It wants blood and will have it no matter how this dysfunctional family tries to manage its public profile.

By Ben Chu | Eagle Eye | Monday, 2 May 2011 at 10:54 am